My question for fellow Gmail users has to do with the quote attribution format used when composing replies to incoming e-mail. In my inbox are messages from a friend who uses Hotmail and a friend who uses Yahoo Mail. When I click on reply in the message from the Hotmail user, the original message is attributed with the string “On $DATE, $NAME wrote:” and the body of the message is indented with “greater than” symbols. When I click on reply in the message from the Yahoo Mail user (or any other correspondent, for that matter), the string “Original message follows:” is automatically inserted, and the original message is quoted verbatim on the subsequent lines, with the usual headers followed by the body text, which is not indented with “greater than” symbols.
Has anyone else noticed this addressee-dependent behavior? Is that a deliberate design feature on Google’s part? I do not see a way to customize the reply attribution format on the settings page, but I recognize that the service is technically still in beta, and such an option might be available at a later date.